He said, "I hadn't known about the strike, of course, but I never fully believed the story that man Lastus brought back with him. There was always something wrong with Gar Ma-lone's death, but I couldn't be sure what. When you showed up, my suspicions Were doubled."

"The way you acted," I said, "I was suspecting you."

He laughed. "I suppose you were. But what did I know about you?"

"That I was an ex-convict.'*

"I didn't know your brother either, of course. Not well. Not to be sure that he would behave this way or that way. You know what I began to think?"

I said, "I think so. That Gar was alive, that he'd made a strike and was keeping it to himself and I was in on it somehow."

"Of course* Coming around to see what we at Ice thought about your brother's so-called death. When you left, I told Lingo to have you followed, and of course he swore you'd managed to elude the man following you. I suppose he never sent anyone after you at all."

"Not from Ice," I said. "From that other outfit, Sledge."

"I've sent word to have Lingo taken care of. That ought to please you."

It didn't. I was finished; I didn't want to follow the threads back any father. There wasn't any beginning; it just went

133

back and back, everything that happened caused by something that happened before it. The ones closest to it were settled with now, and the rest could go on without me. But I didn't say so; I just mumbled something and sipped at my drink.

The Colonel said, "It was Lingo who told us you were robbed and killed. The way he said it, it wasn't part of any plot, just another of the anonymous killings on this filthy place. I didn't know any reason not to believe him." "When did you find out I was alive?" "When Jenna brought you into this building." "But—she said she was waiting for me down at the pier." Jenna said, "The Colonel didn't believe you could still be alive. I did."

The Colonel said, "We have our own spies, you know, in the other corporations. It's a business necessity in a place like this, with so many untapped resources, so many fortunes left to be made. We got word that something was going on at Sledge, it had something to do with us, something to do with a dead prospector of ours named Malone. Their man Phail was involved in it some way, and he seemed to be also the one behind the taking away from a UC Embassy of a man calling himself Rolf Malone. We've been trying to find Phail ever since."

"He had me on that ship of theirs. He was hiding me from his own people, too, General Ingor and the others."

The Colonel said, "You must realize something, Rolf. This is a bad assignment for any man, to be stationed on Anar-chaos. The corporations use their Anarchaotic branches as sort of punishment centers. The men who get shipped here are the ones who've already got a record of bad judgment or worse. The combination of bad people in a bad situation often ends with trouble. Nowhere else would you find someone like Phail so high in the corporate structure."

I said, "Everyone here? All the corporations are like that?" "I know what you're asking, and the answer is yes, me too. My own mistakes have no relevance here. Occasionally a man manages to make amends with his company while here, to build a new reputation for himself and be reassigned elsewhere for a second chance. I hope to be one of those men." The silence after that was uncomfortable for all of us. There was nothing for me to say. I glanced at Jenna and saw

134

her gazing into the fire with a faraway expression on her face. I wondered; her, too? Was she here because of sins in her own past or was she merely an adjunct of Colonel Whistler, dispatched willy-nilly wherever the ups and downs of his career might take him?

The Colonel finally broke the silence by saying, "When General Ingor and the others left the Sledge tower at Ni aboard a seaplane, we thought there was probably some connection, that Phail was more than likely on the Sledge ship somewhere in the Sea of Morning. That didn't help us much, because we had no way of knowing where the ship was. But then cryptographers from all the Sledge towers were sent down here to Cannemuss—they're still waiting, not two blocks from here—and we knew that meant the ship would be coming here. I was sure Phail was aboard the ship, I guessed that the crypto men had something to do with coded information connected somehow with Gar Malone, but I truly didn't expect to find you aboard and alive."

Jenna said, "I never doubted Gar's death, even though the story of how it happened didn't ring true. But about you I wasn't so sure. You'd left the tower looking so hard and sharp and sure of yourself, I couldn't believe you'd been killed so quickly or so easily. I always suspected you were alive somewhere and would turn up some day with a fantastic story to tell."

The Colonel said, "About your brother's notebook. You brought it with you?"

"Yes."

"And can you decipher the code?"

"I don't know; I never tried."

"But you will try, won't you?"

"No. You can copy that page out of the notebook if you want; maybe your crypto people can solve it. But all I want is to get off Anarchaos. I'm going back to Earth."

The Colonel leaned forward, the better to look at me. "Are you sure you haven't decoded the message? You might think you have some personal right to your brother's discovery, and of course you'd be worth a percentage, but you'd be hardly in the position—"

"I don't care about the discovery. It got Gar killed; I don't want any part of it."

135

The Colonel studied me, frowning, firelight reflecting in his eyes. "You aren't interested in money," he said.

I looked at him, and something about his expression, something about his eyes, put me in mind of Phail, when Phail was trying to judge me and couldn't because our values were so different. I said, "I'm interested in going back to Earth. I've been changed by everything here; I want to see what kind of life I can make for myself on Earth."

"Of course," said the Colonel softly. "We'll talk about it in tiie morning." He sat back again, and looked into the fire.

We didn't do any more talking.

XXXVI

jenna came to the room half an hour after I'd gone to bed, as I had known she would, but she never mentioned the notebook until much later, after we had been together a couple of hours. I don't know if that was the result of planning or impulse, though I would say her excitement was genuine. False excitement would have chosen objects other than my scars and left wrist.

When at last she brought the talk around to the business of the night, she began obliquely, murmuring, "I wish you were rich. I wish you were the richest man I knew."

I moved my shoulder, beneath her head, to a more comfortable position, and said, "Why?"

"Because I am a very expensive girl, and I wish you could afford me. I wish we could just pack up, you and I, and go off together, travel from world to world, see everything, do everything."

"You couldn't be a poor man's wife?"

She laughed throatily. "Can you see me back on Earth, in one of those three room project apartments, riding down once a week to market floor for my shopping, setting my own hair, spending my evenings in front of the entertainment wall? Can you really visualize me there?"

"No," I said. "I can't"

She raised up a little and looked at me, smiling. "Can't you ever be rich?" she asked. "Don't you suppose some day you might be beautifully wealthy?"


Перейти на страницу:
Изменить размер шрифта: